Fun with Flames and Fangirls
by Laburnum Steelfang
Summary: Inspired by conversations on the Lower Tadfield lj comm. What would the characters think of what we write about them?
1. Chapter 1

The red-haired woman pressed the Enter key with a red-nailed finger and sat back from the computer with a satisfied smile on her perfectly-made-up red lips. Within the hour, the message board she had just posted to would be in uproar, and all she had to do was ten minutes of typing. She had crafted her flame well. Who would have known that a simple discussion of some kid's book series could spark such extreme rage in so many people?

The formerly peaceful internet café she was sitting in was going a similar way. A young man accidentally spilled his coffee on his girlfriend's brand new dress, causing her to yell at him (partly in rage, and partly in pain as the coffee had been very hot). Two small children began a fist fight, and their mother shouted at them, trying to prise them apart. The woman innocently sipped her cappucino, smirking proudly as she put down the cup.

"Red, is that you?" asked a voice from behind her. She turned in her seat to see a pale youth dressed entirely in grubby white. Pieces of litter and muddy footprints formed a trail behind him. She noticed the litter bin had mysteriously vanished.

"Well, well. Long time no see. Pull up a chair."

"So, how have you been keeping yourself occupied?" asked Pollution, sitting down next to her. The metal legs of his chair immediately began to rust. War shrugged.

"Oh, the usual. Travelling a lot, mostly in the Middle East. Street fight here, suicide bombing there. Right now I'm playing about with the Internet. It's amazing what you can do with it."

"I know," Pollution said with a grin. "I spend at least two hours a day sending spam now - polluting cyberspace. Famine helped me with a set advertising diet pills. It's amazing how many people actually buy them. What are you using it for?" War looked faintly embarrassed.

"Well, my original plan was to hack into the Pentagon's system, but I sort of got sidetracked on a Harry Potter message board." Pollution gave her a funny look. "Starting flamewars is nearly as much fun as the real thing, even if there aren't any deaths." She pointed a neatly manicured finger at the screen. "I just told a bunch of teenage Potter fangirls that I hope Snape dies in the next book because I hate him and he's evil and ugly. I don't really hate him, but of course they don't know that. They're already dividing into two factions – the ones who agree with me and the ones who like Snape." She clicked the Refresh button. When the page reloaded, Pollution saw several new messages. All the titles were written entirely in capitals and ended in varying numbers of exclamation marks. "See? And the beauty of it is, I can come back later on a different username and violently disagree with the post I just made, thus stoking the flames even more."

"Ah, I see," Pollution said admiringly. "Ingenious." War smirked delicately.

"Mortals do come up with some amazing things, don't they?"

* * *

Meanwhile, another red-haired woman was reading the same message board and sighing at the sheer immaturity of the posters. She had once been like them, flaming at the slightest thing, and it hadn't been that long ago either. She liked to think she knew better now, though anyone badmouthing the Weasleys where she could see it would still quickly be toast. Speaking of which . . . Pepper made a mental note to yell at Brian for grinding crumbs into her carpet again. Yes, college students were expected to be untidy, but there were limits.

She remembered she still had an assignment to do. Adam and Wensley had probably already finished theirs, and under normal circumstances so would she, but she had lately been distracted by the discovery of Livejournal. Of course Brian would leave it to the last minute and probably demand help from her. _Unorganised idiot,_ she thought with annoyed affection, _he hasn't changed a bit._ Oh well, time to get back to work. But first her email needed to be checked.

Her inbox was full of the usual junk. Porn, chain letter, more porn, "Dr Black's Weight Loss Pills", an actual email from her friend from the Potter Sue of the Day, yet more porn. . .

Suddenly there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Pepper called, busy deleting spam. The door creaked open and Wensleydale entered.

"Hi Pep," he said. He sounded worried. Pepper turned round.

"What? Don't tell me _you_ need help with your homework! It's not that hard."

"Um. No," he mumbled, fiddling with his watch. "It's just . . . Brian was playing about on the web and he's found something really weird."

"Weird as in what? If it's crop circles or something it can wait till I've done my work."

"No, it's sort of . . . well, you'd better come and see it."

Curious, Pepper stood up and followed Wensleydale.


	2. Chapter 2

Several thousand miles below the foundations of the college campus inhabited by the Them, a scenario seen in office blocks around the world every day was being enacted; two young women standing by a coffee machine, catching up on the latest gossip before returning to work. At least, at first glance it looked like the scenario enacted in earthly office blocks. Human office workers tend to wear a good deal more clothing than these two girls, not to mention they do not usually have fangs and glowing red pupils, and this coffee machine was dispensing not coffee but something suspiciously red and sticky. It might conceivably have been some sort of fruit juice, but considering the context, this was highly unlikely.

Another girl dashed up, wiping sweat from her forehead. This one also had the fangs and glowing red pupils, but she was wearing rather more concealing clothing than the first two – a long white dress with a high neckline rather than the complicated and uncomfortable-looking lace concoctions favoured by her coworkers – and for some reason had tied her brown hair up to resemble two cinnamon buns.

"Well, look who it isn't," said one of the women, fluffing her glossy blonde hair.

"Look, Charlotte, I'm running late, I don't need this," snapped the white-clad girl, pouring herself a B-positive from the machine and gulping it down.

"I see you're still targeting nerds," Charlotte said cattily. "What do they want you to do? Discuss Star Trek?" Her friend tittered. "That's no job for a _real_ succubus, Missy."

"You can talk. When was the last time you did any hands-on work, Miss Let's Pose For Porn Magazines?"

"Hey, that way I can sow lust in thousands of human minds at once without lifting a finger. All I have to do is slap together a fake name and a few details for the caption." She clasped her hands, the empty plastic cup dematerialising neatly as she did so. "_'Annabelle is a nineteen-year-old college student from Basildon. Her favourite colour is green and her hobby is breeding budgies.'_ Or some such garbage. Nobody actually bothers to read the captions anyway."

"You can't keep on like that," Missy pointed out. "Eventually someone's going to realise that you were in the same magazine ten years ago and you haven't aged since."

"You, my dear, are overestimating the reader's powers of observation," said Charlotte's friend, wiping her red-smeared lips.

"Well, we must remember poor Missy's used to observant victims, Magda. Most of them can pick a bad code from a program at twenty paces," Charlotte giggled.

"They're easy targets," Missy muttered grumpily.

"So are beetles. You're bottom-feeding in the sea of souls, my friend. We seduce great kings and lords and politicians, successful businessmen at the very least. Not pathetic teenage boys," Magda sneered.

"For your information, I have a contract with a Duke of Hell!"

This information gave Missy's coworkers pause for thought. Having a Duke interested in her personal services was impressive indeed. She smirked, knowing she'd won.

"Really? Which one?" Charlotte demanded.

"Really. And it's Duke Ligur."

"Duke _Ligur?"_ asked Magda, wrinkling her nose.

"Yeah, I know, but he's paying me for it."

"Ooh. So, what do you do?" Charlotte asked, sounding casual while her body language begged for detail.

"Sorry, he wanted it kept confidential. And he gave me a rather graphic description of what would happen to me if I told." She shuddered briefly, recalling some of the nastier details.

"Ahh, I understand," Charlotte replied, tapping the side of her nose and winking. "Don't kiss and tell, huh?"

"Correct," Missy said, smiling, and sighing inwardly with relief that they hadn't pressed for details. Aside from the threat of messy and probably repeated discorporation, she'd never live it down if they found out she was really teaching the Duke to use Windows.

* * *

Back in the Tadfield University campus, Pepper and Wensleydale entered Brian's room. Adam was already sitting on the bed, looking faintly worried. Brian was at the computer desk, with a similar expression, except there was nothing faint about it. In fact, he looked stunned.

"So what did you find?" Pepper asked, frustrated at being dragged away from important work. Well, okay, she'd been checking her email, but she would have got down to the homework in a few minutes, really.

"Better let Brian tell it," Adam muttered, gesturing towards the youth in question.

"Well," Brian said hesitantly, "I just typed 'Tadfield' into the search engine, just to find out some stuff for my history project, and I got this thing on Livejournal." He pointed to the screen. Pepper peered over his shoulder.

"Why does Lower Tadfield Air Base need a livejournal? Website yes, but why an eljay?"

"Um. It's not really about the airbase," Brian said. Pepper read down the page.

"What's this? 'A/P ficlet. PG-13. Sorry, no title yet.'" She shuddered. "No title yet" was a personal pet peeve of hers. "What fandom is that? And why all this bother over some fanfic thing?"

Brian clicked the link. The page loaded. Pepper read, taking the mouse from Brian's hand to scroll down periodically. She reached the end, blinking. She turned and looked at Adam.

"Somebody's writing about _us?"_


	3. Chapter 3

"O-kay, sir, let's try again," said Missy through a fixed smile. "This is what we call the 'Start' button . . ."

Why had she taken this job? Why? Well, because she was pretty much the only demon who knew how to work a computer and Duke Ligur had told her she would be disembowelled if she didn't teach him, but she was starting to think disembowelment would be a preferable alternative. Ligur had taken three hours of tutoring from the increasingly exasperated succubus to merely work out how to plug in and switch on the computer, and then had managed to clog up the keyboard with cigarette ash. Why he bothered to smoke in the first place, she did not know, as demons don't normally breathe and Hell was full of smoke anyway. Most likely just to irritate people, which was probably the same reason he used that horrible cockney accent, another thing about him which was slowly driving her insane on top of his abuse of the computer. It wasn't even _her_ computer, but she couldn't stand to see any helpless machine manhandled in this way. Fortunately he seemed totally oblivious to her annoyance, despite the deep clawmarks she was gouging in the arms of her computer chair. Since the arms of the chair were made of human bones instead of the more usual plastic, this was not an easy thing to do.

"This thing really ain't easy to use, is it?" Ligur said critically, stubbing out his cigarette on the mouse. Missy cringed.

"No, sir. No, it's not," she agreed, suppressing the urge to scream. Was he doing this deliberately? Possibly yes. Demon lords were always looking for new ways to torment subordinates. _But why me personally? What have I done to deserve this? Oh well, I can always complain to Mummy._ A perk of being one of Lilith's thousands of children was that you could quietly complain to her about demons who outranked you but not her, as long as the demon you were complaining about didn't catch you doing so. She briefly consoled herself with visions of nasty things Mummy did to her victims, then was jerked abruptly out of her reverie by Ligur saying "Wot 'appens if I do this?" She only just managed to prevent him ripping out the CD-ROM drive, and then had to resist the urge to leap claws-first at his throat when he said, "Hey, that's handy – a cup holder!"

On top of the rage at her superior's incompetence, she was getting nervous because of the picture on the wall behind her. She couldn't actually see it when facing the computer, but the mere knowledge that it was there was upsetting and every time she turned her eyes were automatically drawn to it, in the same way as one cannot help staring at a train wreck. Ligur had proudly pointed it out, announcing that he had drawn it himself. It was a life-sized depiction of what he and his associate Duke Hastur were apparently planning to do to Anthony J. Crowley, a.k.a. "that bastard snake Crawly", should they ever get the chance to avenge the now-notorious incident back during the Almost-Apocalypse, nearly ten years ago. The result was . . . best described as graphically unpleasant, even by the standards of Hell. It would probably have been marginally less disturbing if Ligur had chosen to use a medium other than children's wax crayons (mostly red ones).

The Duke in question finally managed to manoeuvre the cursor onto the Start button and click.

"Alright, now move the cursor to the bit which says 'run'," said Missy, mentally screaming _Finally!_

"It won't move," said Ligur, jiggling the mouse.

"Uh, that's because it's stuck in the top corner of the mat," Missy pointed out. "Just pick up the mouse and move it to the middle of the mat, and it'll be fine."

"I thought you said I ain't supposed to pick the mouse up."

"No, sir. What I_ said_ was, it won't work if you hold it in midair and wave it."

"Uh, yeah, I knew that," muttered Ligur, producing match and cigarette from thin air and striking the match on the monitor casing. He looked curiously at Missy. _Weirdo_, he thought. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a succubus with her charisma switched off – when cowering in front of him being yelled at for something or other their charm was usually at a low ebb. It was, however, the first time he had seen a succubus (or anyone, for that matter) wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "C:DOS, C:DOS/RUN, RUN/DOS/RUN". He assumed it was supposed to be some sort of joke, but he didn't understand it, and this annoyed him. He resisted the urge to ask what it meant. One of the major rules of being a high-ranking demon is never to display more ignorance than is strictly necessary. Right now, however, he was going to have to display ignorance again.

"Wot did you say yer name was?"

Missy groaned inwardly. She missed the good old days when high-ranking demons never bothered to ask their subordinate's names. Somehow that was less aggravating than having them ask it, then forget five milliseconds later. Besides, reciting her full name was humiliating.

Of course, she had to recite her full name to Ligur anyway. It took nearly two full minutes. The sound was nearly indescribable, but if one was to try it would be best to compare it to a weird mixture of vaguely Latin-sounding gibberish crossed with Ancient Egyptian, plus a dash of Aztec, being spoken through a mouthful of jelly and gravel. Ligur was looking vaguely shellshocked by the time she finished, sat back and rubbed her throat.

"Sorry, sir," she said. "The tonsil click in the twentieth syllable gets me like that sometimes." She saw the duke's expression and sighed. "Mummy was starting to run out of ideas for names for us and Nyarlathotep owed her a favour," she said, by way of explanation.

"Oh yeah," Ligur said. "Hastur introduced me to the old Crawlin' Chaos once. Right bloody weirdo."

"It's easier to just call me Missy. Everyone does, sir – oh, look at the time! I think we've done all we can for now, I really must be going, I have an emergency appointment in five minutes, same time next week, right?" Missy realised she was starting to babble and shut up, but kept the fixed grin. _Please let me leave! Please!_

"Oh. Yeah. Right. Same time next week, fine." Ligur looked disappointedly at the computer. _Just when I was getting the hang of it, too,_ he thought.

"That's great! I'll be seeing you then, Your Disgrace," said Missy, curtseying. "I can see myself out."

She left in a great hurry, managing at least to get through the office door and out of the Duke's hearing range before tearing wildly at her hair and screaming like a rabid banshee.

"Wait! Please don't hang up, please don't – ah, hello." Aziraphale managed to juggle the phone receiver with the pile of books and coffee mug he was already holding. Admittedly heavenly powers were not really meant to be used to prevent the dropping of books and coffee mugs, but at that precise moment he didn't care much. "Hello, Crowley. Is something wrong?"

"Short answer, yes," Crowley replied. "Uh, look, angel, maybe you should just come over to my place so I can show you. It's complicated."

"Oh? Can you at least give me a summary?" Aziraphale asked, shuffling over to the already-overstacked table to put the books down. He heard Crowley sigh on the other end of the phone.

"O-kay. Some humans have found out about our . . . status."

"Well, that's not a problem, is it? Just modify their memories, we've done it before."

"I can't, angel!" Crowley snapped, more panicked than angry. "I don't know who or where they are! Or how many people know! Someone found out and posted it all over the internet!"

* * *

If you want to know Missy's full name, I'm afraid it's not possible to type in the Roman alphabet and would take up far too much space if I tried. However,in my bio is a link to acomic featuring one of her relatives with a similarly unfortunate name. You can work it out from there. The artist of this comic does not know I exist, but she's a genius. Look for her portrayal of Nyarlathotep in the "Chaos Theory" story arc. 


	4. Chapter 4

Pepper clicked through the "Them" section of the "Lower Tadfield Air Base" memory archives, with an expression of deepening horror. All the entries were on the same lines; stories about their little gang, usuallu about things that either hadn't happened (at least as far as Pepper could remember – she knew she'd never dated Adam - not that she would have objected hugely if he'd asked, ahem - and was pretty sure Adam had never had a friend called Anthony Crowley) or things that nobody except the Them should have known.

"See what I was talking about?" whimpered Wensleydale.

"Yeah. This is . . . beyond creepy. How the hell do they know?"

"I have no idea. Check out the artwork – some of it's awful, but quite a lot's pretty accurate for someone who's probably never seen us," Adam said.

"How do you know they've never seen us!" Brian yelped. "They could be stalking us! They could have spy cameras installed in our rooms! They might be watching us right this minute!"

"Don't be silly, Brian," snapped Pepper. "We grew out of the conspiracy theories when we were twelve and Adam dumped those stupid _New Aquarian_s! There's probably a perfectly reasonable explanation."

"Like what?"

"Er . . . well of course I can't think of one on the spur of the moment, Jeremy Wensleydale! We don't all have your brains, you know, Mr Mensa Member."

"Whoa, let's not argue," interrupted Adam, the eternal peacemaker. "Yeah, this is weird, but it's no reason to fight. Let's all just stay calm and try to think this through."

"O-kay," said Pepper, breathing deeply to calm herself down. "Should we go to the police with this?"

"How the heck would we explain it? I don't know if this counts as stalking or violation of the Data Protection Act or what."

"Breaking copyright?" Wensleydale joked weakly.

"I dunno," Adam said. "I know it's weird, but it doesn't really seem dangerous. They haven't put our addresses or phone numbers, and none of them seem to know Brian or Pepper's last names for some reason. It's just creepy, and sort of annoying, really."

"Yeah, I guess we should keep an eye on it, but we'll leave it for now." Pepper slowly moved her hand to close down the window. Before she clicked the Exit button, she made a mental note of the address. She had to go back later and read some more of those Adam/Pepper stories. For purely research reasons, of course.

* * *

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. SLAM.

"Bloody lousy stupid flamin' . . . gaah!" Missy hissed, marching into her flat in Dis.

"Hard day at work?" came a voice from a puppy-skin armchair.

"Is it that obvious?" said the unfortunate succubus, flinging herself down into another chair.

The dark-haired demon girl who had asked the question looked away from the latest Stephen King novel at her sister.

"Wow, I don't think I've seen you this bad since the Pikachu incident. What happened to you?"

"Trust me, Nona, you really don't want to find out."

Nona put down the book and stood up, straightening her "Secret Of NIMH" T-shirt.

"Aww, c'mon sis, you can tell me."

"No I can't. Boss said keep it quiet or else. We're not just talking discorporation here, we're talking permanent zap. Holy water injections or something."

"Wow, it's worse than the Pikachu incident then."

"You're telling me," Missy sighed and slumped in the chair. "Why is it you got a commendation for 'increasing your range' after you sent that college boy insane and set him on a killing spree, and yet I get no recognition for being forced to deal with complete morons?"

"Because all our bosses are complete morons themselves," said Nona in the nearest thing to a comforting voice a demoness can manage. She looked proudly at the photo of her most famous victim, which was pinned up between the picture of herself accepting the commendation from Beelzebub and her "Fancy Rat of the Month" calendar. The calendar was really just for show, since time in Hell doesn't pass in the way Earth creatures understand it, but Nona kept it anyway. She smirked to herself as she remembered the incident that had earned her fame.

"You know, you do still owe me a favour. Shall we say spilling the beans on why you're so ticked off is your debt settlement?"

Missy sighed. "Fine, you were gonna get it out of me sooner or later. You tell anyone else, _anyone_ – especially Magda or that gossip Nagini or if you even _think_ about telling that bitch Charlotte – I'll be going down anyway - _don't you dare snigger_ – so I'll have nothing to lose by taking you with me."

"Relax, sister dear. Your secret is safe from everyone, especially Charlotte the Harlot."

Missy took a deep breath and told her the story. Nona's smirk broadened with every syllable.

"So the only time you actually made body contact is when you pulled his claws away from the CD-ROM drive?"

"Pretty much. Oh, and he stubbed out one of his cigs on me. Yeah, I know that's weird in our line of work, but he is paying me _and_ threatening me."

"As good a reason as any, I guess," said Nona, now barely keeping her giggles under control.

"Don't you have work to go to?" said Missy coldly.

"Oh, yes. Must be going," Nona replied cheerfully. "Toodles, sister dear!"

As she dematerialised, Missy yelled after her, "Remember, let anyone know and you are so _blessed!"_ She was actually pretty certain Nona wouldn't tell. They trusted each other, insofar as demons can trust each other, and besides, Nona was still depending on her not to tell anyone about her own humiliation during the Pikachu incident.

* * *

Notes; Nona was the title character of a Stephen King short story. It was never outright stated that she was really a demon, nor indeed that she was anything other than the product of a sociopath's hallucinations, but I decided to run with the idea because I liked the story. Read the story to get the references, it's in "Skeleton Crew". Any other King readers here? Nagini, the snake from Harry Potter, being a demon was an idea I stole from lj userdreyauberwald . As for what the "Pikachu incident" was . . . you don't want to know. I'll leave it up to your deranged imaginations. 


End file.
